[LEAPSECS] Leap seconds ain't broken

[Rob Seaman]

Hi Tony,

> Come on, some of the rest of you must have seen some failure reports,
> beyond just having to reboot your telescopes :-)

To be clear, our telescopes were powered down for winter storms. And Steve is discussing a specific legacy telescope. Other telescopes I’ve been associated with have handled leap seconds. Since I’m in Arizona the larger DST transitions are moot, though Chilean Daylight Saving Time has been entertaining for telescopes in the south.

Leap seconds may or may not be a desirable feature. They may or may not be necessary. They cannot be broken, however, unless the IERS were to issue them on a schedule that did not synchronize UTC with Universal Time to the specified tolerance.

Some software may fail to implement them correctly. And then one can say that some vendor's software suffered a fault. The 2016 examples so far seem small in number or impact.

But even then it can’t be determined without more details whether their software is broken. Perhaps the vendors' operating procedures are incomplete. Perhaps a more complex systems engineering issue wasn’t handled correctly. With the current UTC specification there should have been an engineering lien in place in such cases.

There are subtleties to timekeeping. Removing leap seconds wouldn’t remove the subtleties, rather it would promote them to significantly more importance, perhaps “breaking” even more software and systems.

Rob